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Women, Art and Spirituality: The Poor Clares of Early Modern Italy - Review
Art Bulletin, The, March, 1998 by Ann Roberts
One issue that pervades the book is the appropriateness of a community dedicated to poverty spending money for artistic enterprises. Wood explores the Poor Clares' complex and seemingly contradictory notions of the seemliness of such expenditures. On the one hand, the Clares opted to signify their renunciation of worldly things by keeping the architecture of their convents simple. Yet, as the book documents, nuns at houses like Monteluce in Perugia commissioned expensive works of art for the parts of their convents to which the public had access (in particular, the public church), while they were satisfied with more modest adornments for their own churches and chapels. Further, in a chapter dedicated to the works of art surrounding Saint Catherine of Bologna (Caterina Vigri), Wood argues a different attitude toward and function for the visual arts. Vigri was an artist as well as an abbess, and many of her works are preserved in her convent in Bologna. Examining the lives, writings, and reported visions of Vigri and her contemporaries, Wood argues that the making of these works of art - the process of writing or painting - served an important spiritual function for the artist, to "evoke the transcendence of God" (p. 124). Wood identifies a Clarissan "aesthetic attitude," which accepts the presence of fine objects in the convent because they reflect the "eternal bliss to which [the nuns] aspire" (p. 143). Working from a group of illuminated manuscripts, devotional panels, and icons that parallel the expensive items the aristocratic women of the convent were born to, Wood reads their paradisiacal imagery as "inversely proportionate to the amount of renunciation endured during life" (143). Thus, works of art mark the contrast between the nuns' dally realities of ascetic living and the heavenly rewards they desired.
Wood's analysis of Vigri's artistic activity concentrates on the subject matter and reception of her paintings and not on the formal aspects or style of her images. Because several of the objects are preserved today as relics of the saint, they are difficult to study as works of art. (One result of this difficulty is that the photographs of Vigri's Breviary had to be taken from illustrations in an early 20th-century historical study and not from the manuscript itself.) This highlights a problem that is shared by all scholars studying the history of nuns' spirituality and art: many communities still persevere in the missions of their founders, and live their lives in continuity with the past. As a result, access to objects or archival materials may be limited. (Hamburger cites similar difficulties with regard to the Benedictine convent at the center of his study.) An allied problem concerns the multiplicity of styles apparent in the objects that are all assigned to the saint. Wood is not interested in determining whether these works are by Vigri. That they are products of the same moment and sensibility suffices, and the interpretation focuses more on the audience for these images - the nuns - and their response to the images than on any evaluation of Vigri's successes or failures in formal terms.
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